PIANO GREAT PLAYED WITH LEGENDS

Whether performing with such icons as Ella Fitzgerald, Les Paul or Bing Crosby, piano great Paul Smith elevated any musical setting in which he played with his supple touch and dazzling technical prowess. The veteran keyboardist, a San Diego native, died Saturday of heart failure in Torrance, near his longtime home in Redondo Beach, according to his publicist, Alan Eichler. He was 91.

Smith’s career took off when he began working with Fitzgerald in 1955 on the first of her classic “Songbook” albums, which featured the songs of Cole Porter. His partnership with the jazz queen included eight “Songbook” albums, plus the landmark live recording “Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin” and a sublime piano/vocal duo session that was later reissued on CD as “The Intimate Ella.” He worked with her off and on for more than 20 years.

“Smith’s accompaniment is faultless,” wrote Stuart Nicholson in his 1993 biography, “Ella Fitzgerald.” “He has the technique and the imagination to complement rather than complicate.”

“All the singers loved him because he was one of the supreme accompanists,” nationally acclaimed San Diego jazz flutist Holly Hofmann said Thursday afternoon. By coincidence, her husband, San Diego native Mike Wofford, also spent time as Fitzgerald’s pianist and music director.

“I booked Paul to play at the Horton Grand Hotel in 1994 and it was sold out,” Hofmann recalled. “He had a very loyal following here.”

Smith was born in San Diego on April 17, 1922. He attended Jefferson and Florence elementary schools, Roosevelt Junior High and San Diego High. A naturally gifted pianist, he took up the instrument when he was 8. Smith credited his father, former vaudeville trumpeter Lon Jerome Smith — who later became a reporter and then an editor for the San Diego Union — for encouraging his musical career early on and being a constant supporter.

The lanky Smith stood 6 feet, 5 inches. He graduated from San Diego High in 1940, several years after he started hearing some of the nations top jazz artists when they performed here.

“I didn’t want to play in the smoky night clubs,” Smith said in a 1994 Union-Tribune interview. “But I’d sneak into the Creole Palace on Market Street, where a bunch of the black musicians played — I was very tall as a teenager — and sit in the back listening.

“I saw (Jimmie) Lunceford and (Count) Basie, and I saw Chick Webb when Ella was first with him, out at the old Mission Beach Ballroom. She must have been about 19 and was already a great singer. Little did I know I’d end up working with her for years.”

He was in his early 20s when he began playing with guitarist Les Paul’s trio and the Andrews Sisters in the mid-1940s. In 1947, he began a two-year stint with Tommy Dorsey’s big band. But Smith credited a 1951 Los Angeles recording session with Doris Day for first putting him on the map.